Netflix Streams Will Soon Use Less Data

Netflix will recode its entire streaming library so that it uses less data.

Netflix users are not fans of moderation. According to recent stats from Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 37.1 percent of video traffic on fixed access networks, a that number will only go up.

That's great for Netflix, but how do you make sure all that binge watching doesn't degrade the quality of streams? That is what Netflix has been working on for several years, and it has now cracked the code with technology that could reduce data consumption by up to 20 percent.

Variety has the full rundown on Netflix's approach, but the company also posted a rather technical blog post about the effort today, too.

"We've spent years developing an approach, called per-title encoding, where we run analysis on an individual title to determine the optimal encoding recipe based on its complexity," Netflix said. "Imagine having very involved action scenes that need more bits to encapsulate the information versus unchanging landscape scenes or animation that need less. This allows us to deliver the same or better experience while using less bandwidth, which will be particularly important in lower bandwidth countries and as we expand to places where video viewing often happens on mobile networks."

Related

Netflix pointed to BoJack Horseman as "an example of an animation with simple content - flat regions and low motion from frame to frame," while Orange is the New Black has "more average complexity."

What does this mean for you? Not much. Ideally, you'll be able to stream as usual, and in some cases, you might see an improvement in stream quality. As Variety notes, even Netflix employees couldn't tell the difference between streams using the old tech and those using the data-saving features.

Looking ahead, Netflix will likely have 1,000 of its most popular videos fully re-encoded in a new and improved format by the end of 2015. The company expects to have its full library fixed up and ready to use less data by the end of the first quarter of 2016, Variety says.